Now available in the Philippines: pinoywebhosting.net offers cheap, reliable, high speed web hosting for blogs , and for small and medium businesses. Hosting plans start at 500 pesos a year. Order a hosting plan today.
————-
Someone is Tracing back the Philippine’s Blog History and to my surprise, I might be the first Filipino “blogger”. Well at that time, the word “blog” was not yet coined but according to this definition of weblog, I think my site is qualified.
The first “blog” entry still exists in the original site, worldkids.net.
The Featured article from Manila bulletin:How Blogging Started in the Philippines
Blog-o-Rama
How Blogging Started in the Philippines
By Annalyn S. Jusay (now blogging at www.annalyn.net)
Blogging in the Philippines is not yet as big a phenomenon as it is in the US where it has been used for a variety of purposes, such as in the presidential campaigns. However, this doesn’t mean that Filipinos have been left behind in terms of exploring the benefits of this highly-evolving technology.
Our little check showed that the earliest known blog in the country was started by a girl named Lauren Dado way back in 1996, when she was only 10 years old! We stumbled into this interesting fact when my friend Yuga – in response to my question –posted an article in Pinoyblog and on his website www.yugatech.com about “Tracing the Philippines’ Blog History.” Thereupon came several responses from readers about who first started what.
Luckily, we were able to find Lauren who is now a college student in Ateneo and has transferred her archives to www.nimrodel.net. She confirms that “yes, I started my ‘blog’ in December 1996. I guess that makes me the first, though I didn’t really ‘start’ the whole blogging craze in the Philippines.”
Lauren recalls that she was inspired way back then by “a 14-year old British girl named Hayley who had a blog before me and that gave me the idea to have my own.”
“In 1996, a blog was called an ‘online journal.’ It pretty much had the same functions as today’s blogs, except there weren’t any content management systems such as what’s being offered today by Blogger or LiveJournal. The blogs then were updated almost everyday, and entries were written in a diary format. I can’t really remember much of the content except that people never really wrote one-liners, they all had long, descriptive entries,” Lauren points out.
Lauren has a male counterpart in Bikoy of www.bikoy.net. He started blogging when he was 12 and amusingly tells us that until now, when he’s already 17, his parents still don’t know about it.
“My very first online journal entry was dated October 20, 2000 and it was hosted at http://www.diary-x.com. I came across several online journals even before I started my own. Browsing through http://www.diarist.net, I saw that there were already hundreds of online diaries before me, though I’m not sure who among them were Filipinos,” Bikoy notes.
According to Yuga, blogs entered the mainstream around the period 1999-2000. “ Since blogger.com was registered in June 1999, blogspot.com came out on July 2000 and LiveJournal started in April 1999, I guess the oldest true-blue blogs would have been running around those months.”
Some of the Philippine blogosphere’s acknowledged stalwarts have their own interesting stories to tell about how they started blogging.
Connie Veneracion, a.k.a. The Sassy Lawyer at http://houseonahill.net, who is considered one of today’s most widely-read Pinoy bloggers, admits that she put up her site only in February 2003. But this didn’t prevent her from spinning off the first themed blog in the Philippines revolving around food which has been cited in the prestigious Gourmet magazine and other publications.
“I am the first Filipino food blogger. Manong Ken of tribo.org has a much older food site but only recently did he transform it into a blog. So in terms of format, I was the first Pinoy to blog about Filipino food,” the Sassy Lawyer notes.
Gigi Manaloto, a.k.a. Ate Sienna, who founded the very popular Pinoy blogging community called pansitan.net says she has been “blogging for close to three years already but I’ve been putting up my websites, on and off, on Geocities, since 1996.”
A systems analyst & programmer by profession, she says: “I would write my articles and feature other Filipino websites. That was the start of pansitan.com. While I was featuring websites, I stumbled across Filipinos putting up their journals on the web. That’s when I discovered blogging.”
Blogger of the Year awardee Batjay, who can be found at www.nicanordavid.com, said he started his personal website in 1997, “mostly filled with crude pictures and simple one-liners. I formally started blogging in September 2001, right before 9/11. I just arrived in Singapore. I was lonely because it was my first time out of the country and so I used blogging as an outlet to cure my homesickness.”
Asked to make their fearless forecast about the Philippine blogosphere and where it’s headed, those interviewed by Blog-o-rama concurred that it will evolve over the next few years.
Ate Sienna: Blogging is really a big thing now. It is the “in” thing. Everyone, including grandmothers, have one. Maraming fly-by-night din na blogs. I see a decrease of the number in the future, because some people might not be able to sustain having to update their sites on a regular basis. But like the dot.com boom, once the number of blogs decrease, then you’ll be able to discover that the ones who have lasted this long are the ones that have all the substance.
Bikoy: I think blogs will become another venue for commentators to air their opinions. Instead na TV, radio or print lang ang mga pinagkukunan ng kuro-kuro ng mga tao, blogs will emerge as another source of opinions. Since it’s independent from corporate or major political structures or interests, malaki ang potensyal ng blogs to become a venue for more radical opinions na hindi kayang ilabas ng TV, radio or print.
Lauren: There will be a new generation of bloggers.
“ We must start a revolution,” closed Sassy whose pre-teen daughter is following in the footsteps of her famous mother and has started her own blog too.
For comments or inquiries, email the author at annalyn.jusay@gmail.com
